Saturday, June 8, 2013

Barling Bomber

US Army Air Service photo
The Wittemann-Lewis NBL-1 "Barling Bomber" was designed by Walter H. Barling and was commissioned by the US Army, who were looking for a long range strategic bomber in the post WW1 era. The airplane could carry 5000 lbs of bombs, weighed 42,529 lbs, and was powered by 6 Liberty engines. Only one was built. It was underpowered, poor aerodynamically and was scrapped (burned) in 1930.
More info on this interesting plane at Wikipedia

2 comments:

Graham Clayton said...

Were the gun stations manually or automatically manned? If they were manual, then there must have been a crew of nearly a dozen people in the plane!

Mister G said...

In those days I'd have to think they were manual. But they did only make one and give up on the idea :-)